It’s not about price, as GigaOM recently posted an article that discusses shifting motivations for adopting cloud.  Sure, adopting cloud will in some cases be a smaller total cost of ownership (TCO), as well as representing a variable (OpEx) expenditure instead of one big upfront investment (CapEx). Despite cloud vendor focuses on cost, customers note that time to value is the top motivation.

Barb Darrow of GigaOM notes:

What’s interesting to me is that this debate is evolving much like the discussion around Software as a Service (SaaS) did a decade or so ago. Initially, when Salesforce.com was coming into its own, most of the sales pitch was around price. Salesforce was so much cheaper than Siebel Systems.

Of course, when Microsoft started rolling out its own cloud-based CRM, that price-based argument dissipated. [...] Then Salesforce’s benefits became that it freed companies from the tedium and expense of on-site server and software upgrades. You could focus on business and leave the IT heavy lifting to your provider.

Customers want to build out applications or see a return on investment as fast as possible regardless of the project; cloud enables faster iteration and agility. No need to worry about operational headaches — particularly around complex systems like streaming data pipelines or Hadoop clusters. This is a primary reasons why Infochimps’ customers choose our managed, cloud services approach to Big Data.

An even more concrete analysis is performed by Virtual Geek, with some key quotes:

[...] it’s not about being “cheaper than IT”, it’s about:

• Being more agile than traditional IT.
• Being more elastic economically than traditional IT.
• Being more more price transparent than traditional IT.
• Being more “frictionless” than traditional IT.

[...] The place for traditional IT?   IMO – Internal IT are shifting to be more of “IT services brokers”, and less about “operators”.

[...] This isn’t about technology, and the COST is not the benefit of the IaaS model of AWS EC2, it’s that the OPERATING MODEL that is the benefit.

Business units are demanding more insights and delivery on projects that IT has never had to tackle before, such as:

• Managing terabytes and sometimes petabytes of data
• Capturing and analyzing social media, ad impressions, website clickstreams, stock prices, and other fast moving data
• Producing predictive insights, machines learning, statistical modeling, and interactive visualizations and dashboards

IT organizations are discovering that these complex projects don’t have to become the bane of existence and frustrate them for the next several years. These initiatives can be de-risked by embracing “cloud” to iterate more quickly – build faster, fail faster, learn faster, win faster. Cloud empowers the IT team to focus on proving out projects, not just on herding the fundamental systems.

Tim Gasper is the Director of Product for Infochimps. He was previously co-founder and CMO at Keepstream, a social media curation and analytics company. He graduated from Case Western Reserve University with dual degrees in Economics and Management and originally from Cleveland, Ohio.









Image Source: GigaOM – Everest Group – Cloud Connect 2012 Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey

“There’s an app for that.”

We’ve heard it many times, the spoken certainty that the necessities of the world are satisfied by an app.

We love cool apps as much as anyone, so FlowingData caught our attention again with this blog post: “App shows what the Internet looks like”

“In a collaboration between PEER 1 Hosting, Steamclock Software, and Jeff Johnston, the Map of the Internet app provides a picture of what the physical Internet looks like. Users can view Internet service providers (ISPs), Internet exchange points, universities and other organizations through two view options — Globe and Network. The app also allows users to generate a trace route between where they are located to a destination node, search for where popular companies and domains are, as well as identify their current location on the map.”

Now that’s a cool app.

Read more details here >> and download the app for free on iTunes.

Thank you FlowingData for providing interesting posts for us data nerds.









Image source: FlowingData.com

As the uses of Big Data continue to evolve with the creation of platforms and dashboards that promise in-the-moment marketing feedback, much skepticism arises as to whether or not they can deliver on their promise: real-time decision making analytics that are actionable and accessible without a team of data-scientists.

Though advancements are being made every day and with an infinite future of refinement to come, there naturally exists some uncertainty around Big Data, and what it can actually offer marketers. Here are a few of the most common misconceptions fueling such apprehension:

Myth: Campaigns take weeks, if not months to execute.

Truth: Big Data makes real-time campaigns a reality.

As stated simply by GigaOm’s Ravi Mhatre, “Big Data is useless unless it’s also fast”. At a time when social and mobile walk hand-in-hand, marketing departments must be agile, and capable of acting at the drop of a hat (or tweet). The fact is that Big Data has entered an era where “real-time” is possible, and business dashboards power crucial decisions in-the-moment.

Myth: Marketers must still rely on “gut” decisions, which may or may not be reliable.

Truth: Big Data powers success through simple data-driven decisions.

Another common theme among skeptics is the notion that the only people equipped to understand Big Data insights are the data scientists that are siloed in departments and organizations far away from management and marketing. This is simply not the case.

Widely available tools allow marketers and other business experts to derive data-driven insight without having the technical expertise of a data scientist. Marketers can now perform sophisticated analytics to deliver truly actionable information about efficiencies (or lack thereof) within a business, as well as tangible insights about customers.

Myth: Much data is useless.

Truth: All data is powerful; Big Data makes it possible for a business to find unexpected stories and insights.

With traditional techniques, data storage is expensive, and therefore finite. Consequently, companies have had to pick and choose which data is important enough to keep, and have thrown away data which actually could have yielded valuable insight. With new Big Data technologies drastically reducing the storage and management price tag, companies now have the freedom to save and analyze everything – those who do will quickly begin to uncover gems.

As buzz builds around potential enterprise Big Data use-cases, so does hesitation and concern that this is just a fleeting trend; but this couldn’t be farther from the truth.

While we’ve finally reached the point where it is feasible for businesses to tap and start to understand the data that streams from their market, operations, and customers, there’s still much room for refinement. Although one can justifiably state that we’ve entered the era of Big Data, where campaigns can be executed quickly and insights can be pulled in real-time, we’ve just hit the tip of the iceberg in terms of the untapped potential of these technologies.

Amanda McGuckin Hager is a high-tech marketing professional with over 17 years of experience focused on driving demand through strategic marketing programs. She is the Director of Marketing at Infochimps. Follow Amanda on Twitter.

Image Source: brightonwoman.blogspot.com

Flip Kromer, Infochimps Founder and CTO, also known as MrFlip, was named by GitHub as one of the Top 100 Contributors in 2012. Flip made over 2,300 contributions to the global, open source developer community.

And he’s in good company. Also on the list are: Linus Torvals of Linux, Erik Michaels-Ober, and Dr. Nic Williams.

In addition to being a prolific code contributor and one of the nations’ leading data scientists, Flip is the author of Big Data for Chimps, A Guide to Massive Scale Data Processing, published by O’Reilly, and available for pre-order now.

About GitHub: Github, a Forbes’ Top Tech Company of 2012 and the largest code host in the world, was founded in 2008 and is leading enterprises to adopt open source technology. Github, known for social coding, was founded as a place for developers to code together, as teams and individuals.

About Infochimps: The Infochimps Platform for Big Data combines leading data technologies with managed cloud services, a strong partner network to empower customers with unprecedented speed, scale and flexibility in their Big Data initiatives. Infochimps is a privately held, venture-backed company with offices in Austin, TX and the Silicon Valley. Follow @infochimps on Twitter.

Big Data is changing the game for strategic marketing programs. More data is available to marketers than ever before, and intelligently using this data is driving huge increases to the bottom line.

As a marketer, I’m always looking to improve campaign conversions. Show me the data, and I’ll start asking questions with the curiosity of a child.  Check out some of the top questions our customers are asking of Big Data, and some of the corresponding questions that might be asked by a curious child.

Props to the curious, to the driven and to the ones asking the questions. The answers will drive your company forward.

I recently read this ZDNet article, which I thought was an awesome comparison between open-source Big Data vendors such as Infochimps and Cloudera, and proprietary database vendors like Oracle.

The case study: the cost of operating the YouTube stack. Given YouTube’s technical requirements, what would it cost to operate YouTube’s infrastructure on Oracle instead of using open-source tools?

“In a nutshell, the Oracle Exadata capital expenses for hardware and software total $589.4 million compared to an open source and commodity hardware cost of $104.2 million.”

The following chart shows the numbers breakdown:

Open-source software is free. That’s the huge difference. Even if you added another several million dollars for open-source Big Data software support, you’d still come in at less than a quarter of the proprietary database cost.

As companies get more comfortable with trusting open-source tools, the economic value is undeniable. Add the benefits of getting direct access to the code, a huge open-source community, and an unlimited supply of examples and documentation… open-source is fast becoming a no-brainer. It’s only a matter of time where many proprietary strongholds such as BI, BPM, and Data Warehousing are supplanted by open-source Big Data platforms and applications.

What will continue to push open-source adoption and proliferation? (1) Making it easier to gain expertise in using those technologies, or just making them easier to use in the first place, (2) vendors can implement those technologies quickly and efficiently to keep costs down, and (3) high quality open-source vendor support services to offer peace of mind.

ZDNet Article courtesy of Larry Dignan
Money and Laptop image courtesy of BigStock

After a morning discussion about 80s video games and nerd culture, we thought we would share with you, faithful blog reader, one of greatest secrets of the Infochimps website.

Go here to our team page and give it a whirl.  Bonus geek points if you can spot all the references!

Sometimes, when we are trying to explain what Infochimps does, it can be tough to help folks understand the total package. To help with this, we put together a tour of the Infochimps Platform. Now, you can discover how we can work with your team to take data from the sources you need, make it useful, and deliver the insights you need to improve your business. Check it out!

Infochimps uses many cutting edge tools (Chef, Amazon Web Services, Hadoop, Hbase, ElasticSearch, Flume, MongoDB, Phantom.js, etc. ad nauseum), and we’ve written a number of custom tools to help corral these sometimes wild horses into a working team. Ironfan, our Chef specialization for big-data in the cloud, coordinates the installation and configuration of the many necessary components. Wukong is our Ruby library for Hadoop, combining the flexibility of JRuby with the raw power of MapReduce. Wonderdog is our Hadoop interface to ElasticSearch, allowing us to deliver large amounts of data quickly into a stable and searchable NoSQL data stores. Swineherd, the workflow engine for Hadoop jobs, helps tie all of this together into a coherent framework for running multi-stage data ingestions.

To crib a DevOps aphorism, however, it’s not the technology that makes Infochimps work: it’s the culture. Specifically, it’s about culture that keeps the challenges from all that novel technology manageable.

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Infochimps is happy to announce that we now support the next generation Rackspace Cloud, based on OpenStack. Through integration with the OpenStack API the Infochimps Platform can now power big data applications based in the Rackspace Cloud, expanding the reach of the Infochimps Platform and making the running of complex big data infrastructures quick and easy for a broader range of users.

Rackspace customers running the new OpenStack-based Rackspace Cloud Servers can quickly and easily spin up Hadoop clusters to power their big data applications in as little as 20 minutes with a single command using the Infochimps Platform. With the power of Ironfan, Infochimps’ open source provisioning tool, and Dashpot, Infochimps’ visualization and operations dashboard, customers can easily monitor and manage their Big Data operations on an ongoing basis, or leave it to Infochimps to manage it on the Rackspace Cloud for them.

Check out this demo of Infochimps Platform running in the Rackspace Cloud:

Why OpenStack and Rackspace?
From the beginning, the Infochimps Platform has been built on a foundation of open source tools for managing data, aimed at simplifying the experience of working with complex technologies such as Hadoop or Cassandra. Within the Infochimps Platform, Wukong, Ironfan and Swineherd are major open sourced components of the stack. OpenStack supports our open source tradition with its strong open source ecosystem. It is used by and contributed to by not only Rackspace, but organizations such as NASA, Canonical, RedHat, Dell, HP, and AT&T, so its architecture serves a multitude of needs, rather than bending to the whims of a single provider.

OpenStack also encourages standardization among Infrastructure as a Service providers, which ultimately benefits everyone in the market. Clients can make (and remake) decisions based on their businesses’ current day to day needs, without needing to employ a crystal ball to try to predict which provider will be best for them in the long term. By sharing open and standard interfaces, cloud providers can compete on current quality and value, instead of fighting to lock-in customers based on promises.

The modular design of OpenStack is part of what makes standards possible without blocking innovation. There are a set of core APIs that every provider will support, and extensions for added capabilities that not every provider will want to allow. The contracts these APIs provide can be (and often are) fulfilled by different back-end providers, letting each provider make different architectural choices without requiring customers to completely retool to take advantage of them. All of this allows apples-to-apples comparison of provider architectures, without making orange sales impossible.

What does OpenStack mean for Infochimps?
The work we’ve done to support this announcement has enabled us to provide a level of abstraction from the Amazon Web Services environment, and we can deploy our platform in a cloud agnostic way. Many of our customers have asked for implementations on their in-house cloud environments – our OpenStack support allows those implementations to be airlifted in using a common set of APIs that sit on top of whatever infrastructure already exists, instead of one-off installations that require more custom development and introduce brittleness.

Interested in learning more about Infochimps, Rackspace, and OpenStack? Contact us today for more information!